FolkAndRoots Present Andrew Cronshaw (As part of Independent Venue week)

Andrew Cronshaw is a British multi-instrumentalist, producer, world music journalist and musical explorer.

He’s been playing zither and making albums since the early 1970s. He’s never been exactly part of the mainstream, but his work, strongly based on traditional musics, has gained universally excellent reviews, BBC World and Folk Award nominations and over the years has picked up what might be called a niche following. He’s been joined live and on record by a slew of well-known musicians, and played on those of others in the worlds of roots, pop and film. Two of his albums are with his Finnish/Armenian/British band SANS, whose 2018 second album ‘Kulku’ reached numbers one and two in the two world music charts, and won an EMMA (Finnish Grammy).

At the heart of his instrumentation is the rich, dark chiming of a 74-string electrified European chord zither – he’s the only musician in the world to make a professional career of playing this particular form of zither – to which he adds a range of other stringed and wind instruments including fujara (a huge, ornately carved Slovakian shepherd’s three-hole flute generating shivering breathy harmonics), marovantele (his unique hybrid of Finnish kantele and Madagascan marovany – in the 90’s he toured worldwide doing sound and tour managing for Malagasy band Tarika), and the seductive-toned Chinese metal-reeded ba-wu, all enhanced by the subtle use of wide electronically-created spaces. But his twelfth, most recent album, ‘Zithers’, again a high achiever in the world music charts, is the first he’s ever done entirely solo, and on just two instruments.

For the past thirty years he has been particularly connected with the traditional music of Finland and other Finno-Ugrian and Nordic countries, but before that, and continuing strong influences, are the musics of Scotland and its highlands, as well as of his English birthplace, and of northern Spain with which he has been familiar since childhood. He also draws on experience with the musics of Serbia and the Tatra mountains of Poland and Slovakia.